


To Their End

by deborah_judge



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Prehistoric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 23:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/680106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the Colonial colony from the point of view of the Earth!human who ended it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Their End

**Author's Note:**

> Since bsg_remix is coming around again I was thinking about the [remix story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/396944) I wrote last year, which put me in the mood to write another story in that universe. This one is from the POV of the tribemother from that story. Since the remix was of rose_griffes's excellent fic [Prophecy](http://trial-by-water.livejournal.com/6510.html), this one is dedicated to Rose as well.

When this story began I did not have a name. I had passed eight hands of years and was tribemother to a tribe that made yearly journeys from the mountains where the berries grew to the rivers where we caught fish with spears. My tribe did not have a name, but it had sounds, a rhythm of claps that we walked by and a melody that we sang at the tribegathering. Nothing had names then. Things were what they were.

The people who fell from the sky came to the plains unlearned like children. They came in a broken flying cave that gave them food, but when the food in their stores ran out they did not know how to find more. A skywoman came to our tribe and we welcomed her. It is good for the tribe to grow. She called herself close-to-the-chest, beloved-of-the-heart. _Kara_. In the sky, she said, people have their own sounds, words that are theirs and theirs alone. Her name was the first word we learned.

When more skypeople joined us they brought other words, other names. _Caprica_ , place-of-the-ram. _Tauron_ , place-of-the-bull. These were the names of their homes in the sky that they came from. Kara spread out her hands, pointed to the fire. These places were gone. They had been destroyed.

My people have been on the plains since the ice melted and water began to run through the valleys. Tribes form and tribes break, but the tribegathering endures. In my mother's day there was a tribe in the north whose hunting grounds were burned by fire, and we took them in and welcomed them into our tribe. I had the tribespeople teach Kara our way to hunt, and we hunted together and brought food to the skypeople's camp.

For eight years the skypeople lived apart. They tried to make food by putting seeds in the ground and then watering until they grew. They ignored the berries in the mountains, or couldn't find them, and didn't even catch an antelope when one walked by their camp. When their cave began to leak they built tents of cloth that did not keep out the rain. We brought them food when we could. We came to know them. _Athena_ , one was called, woman-of-knowing. She died the seventh summer, as did her husband, man-of-goodness. We sat with the skypeople as they wept and burned fires. We brought them more food.

In the eighth winter the skypeople's camp was small. Many had gone to join the tribes, we had accepted many and so had the other tribes of the valley. Others had joined tribes further north. Some were still living from the food we brought them and the meager grains that they forced to grow from the earth. But we could not bring them food all the time because we were not always near, our hunts took us where the animals led and when the fish swam we needed to be by the stream. In the winter when I came to them they were hungry, and the young woman who was birthing a child was not strong. She was too frail, too young, had eaten too little. Her name was _Hera_ , mistress, and she was brave, but as I birthed her child she died in my arms.

I held the young girl, the child with no mother. These skypeople were children with no mother, their mother had died on their destroyed places and if they needed a mother then I would mother them. "This ends now," I said. I spoke in their own words so that they would understand me, and I held the newborn child close. To my own people I would have struck the ground with my hand. "You will join the tribes," I said. "We will teach you to live here." There were new mothers in the tribe who could suckle this baby and keep her from dying of hunger like her mother had. "This one comes with me," I said.

"Then I do too," a woman jumped up and said. She called herself _Caprica_ , memory of the place of the goats. She was strong and would be a good hunter. "I will too," said a man called _Gaius_ , spirit of the ground. "I can teach you how to farm."

"We will learn the lore," I said. "We will remember it." We will not do it, he understood. We hunt on the plains and fish in the rivers and gather berries in the mountains and we do not hunger.

They did not all come immediately. But they all came, to my tribe or another, once we stopped bringing food to their camp. There was no other way for them to live. Hera was the last to be buried at the camp of the skypeople. We placed a marker on her grave.

"It's you," said Kara, beloved-one. "They said I'd lead them all to their end. I led them to you." 

"We are also ended," I said. Words were still not easy, but I was learning them. "We are not what we were." We were now a people that spoke words.

Five hands of years have passed since the skypeople's camp has been empty. Words flow through all our tribes, we use them apart and when we meet. Gaius teaches the lore of farming, and the stories of the skypeople. We remember them.

I know that I will die soon. I will die without a name, as I lived so long without one, though I took one and then another in time. The skywoman Caprica will be the next tribemother, and you will call her mother as you once called me.

Without words, things are only what they are. There is sky, and forest, and earth, and water, and tribepeople moving through them alive. Words tell stories. Words make us remember, and remember things that are not.

You are a child of the sky, born on Earth to a people that I ended, born on the same day that I ended them. You have words to tell their story and yours. When you do, daughter, remember me.


End file.
